As I do my first read through after draft, I make grammar changes on the fly, but bigger issues like character motivation, description, or consistency go in a “to do” list.
It would be quite fantastic to be able to build a task list for each document, complete with interactive check boxes.
Secondarily, having that task list roll up to a global list accessible from the project menu would be amazing. That way, as you edit, you could see which tasks have been completed from chapter to chapter and how many globally are still to go.
I use Inspector Comments for this, along with a unique “code” for each type of to do the item is. For example if I’m going through a section, and I know it needs a screenshot but I’m not around Photoshop at the moment, I’ll just put a comment into the text where I want the figure, and type in “SCREENSHOT//” with maybe some description after the slashes. I now have something unique that I can search for that will only ever turn up documents with this phrase in the comment. You can make a collection that automatically searches for this phrase, so every time you click on the tab, you get a list of every portion of the draft requiring work.
I snapshot the section, and as I resolve issues I delete the comments. That’s my “Done” action, and if I ever need to go through the “change log”, I can go through snapshots and see the comments again (their text will appear in a tooltip when hovering over them in the snapshot pane).
I actually do something similar with the inspector comments, but I intentionally misspell the code word that I use. That way, I don’t get extra documents that might, somehow, have the correctly spelled version of the code word somewhere in the text.
Screenshot becomes ScrnShot, Block Quote becomes BlkQt, etc.
Yeah that’s what I usually do as well “RWRI” for Rewrite, etc. Where I do still like the punctuation is because for some things it lets me mark things as done, without actually removing it. Sometimes I do want notes lurking around (maybe notes on what steps I took to create the screenshot, in case I have to redo it), so changing it to “CODE\” from “CODE//” has the same effect as deleting it, from the search collection’s perspective, since it only looks for the “//” suffix. But I can still find all “CODE” items, too. Uniqueness in the spelling is where that helps.
Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me get it to work.
Here is my process:
Open a document
Select a bit of text and create a comment from the inspector panel - IE “RWRI - Revisit Fike’s motivation here, weak”
Enter RWRI into the search panel just above and set search settings to “All” fields, “Any word”, both included and excluded documents and hit enter.
Nothing shows up in the search results.
I’ve played with about every permutation of those settings with no luck. However, If I type in the MC’s name, I get results for all of my chapters. So, it is searching the project. Not sure what’s going on.
I just tried this in the latest beta, and it works.
I created an inspector comment and put in “BLERGH-this is a comment”
I searched for “BLERGH”; My search settings are: All, Any Word, Search “Included” Documents, Search “Excluded” documents.
I got the one document which contains BLERGH as part of a comment, but does not contain that word in the document proper.
Is it possible that you’ve accidentally entered a misspelled search term? Try copying it and pasting into the search field. I’ve done this before, not being able to see that I had transposed two characters, but when I pasted over the old search term, noticed immediately when the letters swapped position. It’s worth a shot at least…
I tested on the Windows regular release, and the beta too. Maybe your search indexes are messed up? Try the Tools->Save and Rebuild Search Indexes menu (it can’t hurt). If that doesn’t work, create a test project, make a comment on some text, and then search for the comment.